Praetorian Prefect » Uncategorized

A Brief Reminder, Passwords Have Been Around Forever

Prefect — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:25:21 +0000

The much maligned password has existed for thousands of years, for example the Greek historian Polybius described their use in the Roman military before the birth of Christ.

To illustrate the point here is a clip, the password scene, from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie “Horse Feathers”.

At first he thought the password was ‘password’, putting him right in line with what is typically quoted as the second most frequently used password in computer systems.

Swordfish doesn’t appear in the top 500 worst passwords. Also a plus, they change the password often.

Remember, the password is ‘Swordfish’.

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Google’s New Year’s Eve Tricks

Prefect — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Google likes to have fun with the holidays, and it appears that New Year’s Eve will be no exception. People who have been hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button lately with a blank search have been presented with a timer counting down the seconds to New Year’s Eve. The timer is based on the PC clock.

Click 'I'm Feeling Lucky' with a blank search.

To see what Google is planning when the clock strikes zero (as I’ll be drinking champagne at midnight not watching google.com), make a quick change to our PC time by double clicking the clock on your PC, and modifying the time to 11:59pm:

Change your Windows time to 11:59pm.

Once the timer hits zero on Google, text based fireworks and a ‘Happy New Year’ message are revealed:

Fireworks, Google style.

Happy New Year from all of us at Praetorian Security Group, LLC.

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Halloween Jokes, Twitter & Google

Prefect — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:06:57 +0000

Both Twitter and Google have pulled some decent jokes this Halloween. Starting with Google, they have as usual implemented a holiday logo, this year the logo’s candy unwraps each time you click on it. More subtly though, the robots.txt file on Google contains some special instructions for User-agent: Kids (For the uninitiated, the robots.txt file tells search bots like Googlebot which pages not to index on a web site). Its part of a tradition, last year /brains were disallowed for user-agent: zombies.

Google's Halloween logo transformation.

Some special instructions in Google's robot.txt file.

Twitter has started to follow suit on the hijinks, this year if you put the the words trick or treat in as hashtags (so #trick or #treat) in the Twitter web interface, the web site modifies itself. In the case of #treat the effect is minor, the background changes and Twitter wishes you a happy Halloween. But if you put #trick in as your status, you get an homage to the zombie film 28 Days Later as those in your Twitter stream start to infect each other.

Result of inputting #trick as your Twitter status.

Result of inputting #treat as your Twitter status.

Happy Halloween.

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